A couple of years ago I wrote about the first season of the Apple TV series Sugar and the massive twist is threw at the audience near the end of the season. At the time, I couldn’t figure out whether that “oh, hey, he’s an alien?” gambit worked. As I wrote:

While I still can’t say whether the twist really worked, it appears we’re going to have another chance to find out. Sugar has been renewed for a second season and it’ll be impossible to move forward without addressing the elephant in the room now.

Or the alien.

Now, with the second season in the books, I thought I’d return to the issue of the big twist and whether it paid off.

To recap, Colin Ferrel plays the titular Sugar, a private eye in Los Angeles who specializes in finding missing persons. He’s a little strange, unusually kind, and has a fascination with older noir movies. Part of that is because he’s an alien, part of a group sent to observe humanity and report back. At the end of the first season the group comes under threat and all the rest leave Earth. Sugar stays behind, both because he kind of loves the place, but also because he’s trying to find his lost sister.

I’ll say here that, since there’s a revamped X-Files on the way, I’d really like to see a Sugar/Mulder team up, since they’re both driven by missing sisters and, well, Mulder always wanted to meet an alien, right?

Season two quickly wraps up the sister story, or at least it appears, and plunges Sugar into a new case involving a pair of Korean brothers, a boxer and his trainer/junkie brother, who get involved with the wrong crowd. Alongside that, Sugar tries to figure out who a former Senator is really working for. A femme fatale even appears (Laura Donnelly from the short-lived The Nevers) who is, of course, not what she appears to be (she’s not an alien, though).

Honestly, the two stories have little to do with each other. The brothers’ case is interesting enough, although not as much as the Hollywood mystery from season one, which played into Sugar’s cinephilia. But it has fuck all to do with the fact that Sugar’s an alien. You can read his characterization as evidence of his alienness, but it never goes beyond what you could do with a regular human character. Even his surviving a shooting feels more like plot armor and less like “ooh, he’s an alien.” There’s nothing about his day-to-day life that is complicated by the fact that he’s from another planet.

The brothers’ story wraps up and the show pivots in the last couple of episodes to a woman who, it turns out, is Sugar’s sister. She’s the one behind the hunt for their alien counterparts all in the service of a scheme to make the Earth more suitable for their domination.

In other words, when it’s time to lean into the whole “he’s an alien” part of things, Sugar heads straight for alien-invasion tropes. Which is a shame, because really investigating what it meant for a man from another planet to live and survive on Earth, while doing good and learning to love us as a species, would be kind of interesting. Alas.

I read afterwards that the show’s creator left after season one, which makes a certain kind of sense. The second season reads like someone who has a handle on the private eye stuff but no real idea what it means that this guy is an alien. A bigger, world endangering alien plot is easy to pull off the shelf in incorporate.

So, after a second season, does the big twist work? Not really. Not because it couldn’t, but because nobody seems to really care if it does.